Sigma Designs followed closely by Realtek are the two dominant powers in the media player market and with both of them releasing their latest HD decoding chipsets in the market it's not really surprising that most media player manufacturers have released their offerings based on those two solutions. A couple of weeks ago we tested the latest media player by RaidSonic the Icy Box IB-MP3011Plus which was based on the previous RTD1185 chipset by Realtek and performed very well for a cost-effective solution. Today however we are taking things a bit further with the latest high-end S-Series R300 Network HD Media Player from Egreat.

EGREAT was established in August 2006 and is based in China. They have spent much on the R&D department in a continuous pursuit of perfection in arts and crafts and that ensures that they get high quality and innovative products. Their current product line includes multi-media hard-disk players, HD network HDD Players, Network storage servers, digital photo frames, advertising machines, USB video creator, USB DVR surveillance system and company accessories. Having already reviewed most Multimedia Network Tanks from EGREAT we have quite a good idea of what kind of performance to expect from their high quality and feature rich solutions.

The Egreat R300 Network Media Player comes with the latest RTD1186 decoding chipset by Realtek which compared to the RTD1185 is quite faster (750MHz/500MHz), features an OpenGL ES.2 compliant GPU, supports decoding of AVC/VC-1 media and also carries the latest HDMI 1.4 with CEC and 3D support. Moving to the rest of the player the brushed aluminum R300 also features 512MB DDR3 SDRAM paired with 4GB of MLC NAND flash, hot-swap 3.5" HDD bay, USB 3.0 port, Gigabit LAN, dual Wi-Fi network antennas and an external powered SATA port. Well on paper all these look very promising indeed but we always like to make our conclusions based on the end result since that's what really counts and this review is not an exception.